Constitutional Law

Supreme Court Says Civil Rights Law Bars Worker Retaliation

The Supreme Court ruled today that a federal civil rights law protects an employee from being fired for reporting cases of sexual harassment during an internal investigation. The high court ruled unanimously in Crawford v. Metropolitan Government of Nashville that the “antiretaliation” provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 extends to an employee who reports sexual harassment on the job by during an internal investigation that was not prompted by the employee.

In 2002, the Metro School District in Nashville launched an investigation into sexual harassment rumors surrounding the school district’s employee relations director. Metro employee Vicky Crawford told investigators about numerous incidents of sexual harassment on behalf of the director. Subsequently Crawford was fired. Crawford filed a lawsuit against Metro pursuant to the Civil Rights Act, arguing that officials retaliated against her reports of sexual harassment. Lower courts had dismissed Crawford’s suit, concluding that she had not initiated the charges of sexual harassment, but had “merely answered questions by investigators in an already-pending internal investigation, initiated by someone else.”

Writing for the majority in Crawford, Justice David Souter, concluded that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act does extend to a worker who reports incident of sexual harassment during an investigation not prompted by the worker. Souter wrote that “nothing in the statute requires a freakish rule protecting an employee who reports discrimination on her own initiative but not one who reports the same discrimination in the same words when her boss asks a question.” In a guest blog post for ACS, the First Amendment Center’s David L. Hudson Jr. analyzed the Crawford case and concluded that if the lower federal court decisions were to stand, “Employee-witnesses will be chilled from speaking the truth about inappropriate sexual conduct by supervisors and co-workers for fear of meeting the same fate of Vicky Crawford.” Hudson’s article is available here.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on January 26, 2009 (boomark / email).